Down but not out in Guatemala

When I finished university last year, I had it in my mind that I wanted to move to the West coast of Ireland and write a novel whilst living off social welfare, which is about 200 euro a week. I hadn’t thought through the logistics at all, but that’s what I wanted.

As it went, I stayed in Greystones and wrote from there all summer. It was quite nice: I was living at my family home, getting by on the social welfare I’d been granted, sitting in the garden, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all day. I took the occasional break to terrorize my poor mother or to walk the dogs, but otherwise I was writing.

I was more or less content doing this for a few months, but I slowly began to realize, at the age of 25, I needed a longer-term plan. I took a CELTA in Dublin where I learnt how to teach English. I had no idea what I was doing initially; I hated public speaking. In university I would tremble, my hands vibrating as I gave presentations. So when it came to teaching English, I was, at least initially, terrified of the idea. After a month of the course, I became a decent teacher and I quite enjoyed it. This would be my longer-term plan.

“I lost count of how many times I was told “this is all completely legal,” despite being told to say I’m a volunteer, not a paid teacher.”

I got some (very) part-time cover work in a language school in town. It was a bastard of a commute, but it was paid practice, and I had set my sights on moving to Central America to teach and travel. So the cover work was a short-term plan to get me up to scratch on teaching, but I was earning less than what I did on the dole. This just about tied me over from September to December, which is when I left for Guatemala with just 500 euro in my pocket.

A lot of people were confused and curious as to why I was moving to Guatemala. “It’s terribly dangerous over there, you know. Why would you want to go somewhere like that?” one friend’s mother said to me the last time I saw her. My younger sister had been there for the past year and I hadn’t seen her in two years, so that was some incentive. We’re very close, and I’d missed her. We lived in Guatemala together for 10 months until recently.

Before I left Ireland, I had a Skype interview with a school and volunteer centre in Gutemala. They told me I would be starting two days after arriving. The pay was $500 a month, which I was told is “more than enough to live comfortably in a third world country.” I found the use of “third world” quite inappropriate for a language school and volunteer centre manager. I later found out that $500 is not a livable wage, even in a developing country like Guatemala. In fact, it was an awful wage considering our working hours and the class prep you don’t get paid for. I struggled to exist on that wage.

Upon my arrival, I had an induction at the school and they informed me it would actually be another month before I began working. The induction continued anyway; I lost count of how many times I was told “this is all completely legal,” despite being told to say I’m a volunteer, not a paid teacher. This was down to work visas. I asked about exams and such.

“To be honest, we really don’t give a crap about their grades, as long as they like you and you’re fun,” the centre manager responded in her Southern drawl.

As an aspiring teacher, this didn’t sit too well with me at all. She told me the most important things were the encuestas, which were a monthly questionnaire about the teachers, filled out by the students. You needed to receive majority ‘Excellent’ reviews. ‘Good’ was seen as bad. And ‘Needs Improvement’ essentially meant the sack. Grades never came into it.

The encuestas essentially stripped the school and management of any responsibility and held the teachers accountable for the awful curriculum, exams and overall management. The curriculum and exams had not been changed or updated since 2007. Students were put into unsuitable levels, just because there was space. The levels worked so that the entire course was much longer than necessary in order to maximise the level of paying “clients”, as management called them.

The school’s sole focus was to make as much money as possible by having entertainers rather than teachers. The locals who worked as Spanish teachers were paid even less than the English teachers, despite the Spanish lessons costing far more than English lessons, and generating a lot more profit for the school. The Guatemalans who taught Spanish were paid $250 per month. This, I believe, is because they have lower expectations of a teaching salary and the school owners know they can get away with paying locals a much lower wage.

The volunteer program was even worse. It cost $3,000 to volunteer for 10 days, which basically involved visiting sick children or helping out to build a school. These are all lovely things to do, of course, but I don’t see where the $3,000 goes. Call me cynical, but I really didn’t like what I saw from the volunteer program. I saw a lot of rich white people doing their time on a volunteer program to get some snaps with poor children, and get their internship back home. I overheard how well “volunteered in Guatemala” looks on a CV a few times. There are thousands of exploitative volunteer companies and language schools making lot of money doing this in developing countries throughout Central and South America. I felt pretty awful for being involved in that school, and I was completely broke.

Eventually I finished my 6-month contract and started some bar work. I was still broke, even more so than when I was teaching. I met a guy who was offering some writing work and immediately took him up on it. I would ghost write under his name for various websites. The articles were ludicrous and I lost my mind for a long time. Working in bars meant drinking a lot, and the writing was just mad. I had to write 2,000 words entitled “Can Rabbits Eat Carrots.” I went on a rant comparing Bugs Bunny to the Marlboro Man because, counter to popular belief, carrots aren’t good for rabbits. So watch out for that. More recently I wrote 7,000 words on tactical flashlights for an eBook. That’s nearly the same size as my university dissertation. Between these two jobs and my excessive consumption outside of working hours, the plot has been well and truly lost for a few months.

I take on as much writing like this as possible. Once you accept the madness of it, you can make it a lot of fun. But of course, there are some terrible, gruelling days. I generally receive a list now, with word counts and titles. If it’s from a company selling kitchen utensils, I know I’ve got a rotten week on my hands. But it’s this work that has led me onto other writing jobs; jobs that I really want. I still do the other stuff to keep my finances stable, because I’m traveling up Guatemala and into Mexico at the moment. This keeps me afloat, and it’s easy to do on a shuttle bus.

But my point is, I’ve found that teaching is not for me, and that I’ll pursue writing; any kind of writing I can get. I can write about things I know nothing about just as well as I can write about things I’m an expert on. I’m going home to pursue journalism. I left home to figure out what I want to do in life, and I was pretty sure it would be teaching. I’m delighted to say that’s not the case. I have a lot of fun in my job, if you’d call it that. It’s more like a series of random jobs. That doesn’t sound too stable, but nothing is. Underemployment forced me into finding what I want to do. It’s been a difficult but highly beneficial thing for me.

I used to get incredibly anxious about what the fuck I’m doing with my life. I dropped out of university twice. I dabbled in excessive behavior for quite a while in between. After a third and successful run at university, leaving home was one of the hardest things I could do. I left a lot behind. But ultimately it’s helped and developed me immeasurably. I’ll be glad to explain this to the same people who asked me “Why are you going to Guatemala?”

Patrick is a young man from the East Coast of Ireland. He fucked about for a few years after school then did a degree in English, Media and Cultural Studies. He is confused by the world, but he does enjoy soul music and Manchester United. In all likelihood, he’s currently sipping rum from a coconut somewhere in the Caribbean.

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